What's five months during a pandemic?

Sorry, I got held up by Christian nationalist enablers

I started typing an email to Marsha Blackburn’s church and when I finished half a year had passed. That’s what trying to gain momentum for this open letter has felt like, anyway: just one long, possibly vain attempt at screaming loudly enough to wake up people who have stuffed their ears with rocks. (I have heard that rocks can cry out on occasion, but not, it seems, these ones.) Anyway, I’m exhausted from trying to talk to people who would like to pretend that I and 700+ signatories of the open letter don’t exist, so I thought I’d at least spend some time writing people who, at least at one point, elected to hear from me. I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, but I’m going to do my damndest to keep up this newsletter a little more frequently than once every five months.

Anyway, perhaps you’d wondering whether I’m being slightly melodramatic when I say that attempting to communicate with fascist enablers has fractured my very sense of time and space. And maybe, just maybe, I have no one to blame but little old me for this sense of temporal maladjustment. No one asked me to leave a voice mail for Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s pastor this morning, after all; I just went ahead and did it. I suppose I keep nudging the bloated corpse of Evangelicalism for the same reason that the poor bastards presently evacuating their bank accounts at the Bellagio are, even as I write this, reaching for the dice one more time: because the chance of my luck finally turning around is too tantalizing to ignore. In the meantime, I want to highlight one reason why it’s been so exhausting to poke at the congealing remains of this nation’s religious institutions:

The model minority myth has sunk deep, deep, deep into the collective consciousness of Asian America.

The last email above is a communication from a Chinese theologian who, apparently, thinks that I have started a new chapter of the Symbionese Liberation Army. While there have been plenty of academics who have signed the letter, this reflexive aversion to calling out specific churches is, sadly, all too typical of Asians who’ve hung a diploma or three on their walls. Fifty five years after the term “model minority” first disgraced the pages of the New York Times, the spirit of compliance has settled into the psyche of 7% of the American population, an impossibly well-postured demon sporting chinos and a polo shirt.

One Chinese pastor told me he would have loved to sign, but he can’t because it would fracture his church; this apology was shortly followed by an email from one of his elders, who, having caught wind of the letter, insinuated that I was a Commie spy. A Korean pastor who’s made his name doing left-ish sounding talks about injustice said he couldn’t sign the letter because he “doesn’t know enough about these politicians to comment at this time.” (Or any other time, because I suppose the careers of said politicians sits at the absolute bottom of his Shit I Have To Learn list.) A Chinese pastor on a racial reconciliation committee for a major denomination told me he sympathizes with the letter, but that showing open support was a bridge too far. Another Chinese academic passed on signing because he felt the letter infringed on ecclesial autonomy. (An unenforceable request for a catastrophically passive congregation to take action equates to hijacking its monthly deaconate meeting, I suppose.)

Then there was the lengthy missive I received from a Chinese academic who literally hails from the mainland—a rambling disquisition that implicitly designated hateful US demagogues the lesser of two evils, our last bulwark against the Bond villain-like machinations of the Chinese Communist Party. A credentialed intellectual who fails to see that one can critique Sinophobia without simping for Xi Jinping? You don’t say!

Reader, I am tired, so very tired, of vaguely liberal Asians who show off their fluency in the language of social justice, while finding every reason in the (Good) book not to append their name to a very basic plea for accountability and material transformation. We are fatally accustomed to being the proverbial kid at school whom everyone expects to spend at least an hour a week stuffed into a locker. Each time we emerge—whether it was after the Exclusion Act, or after the Japanese internment camps, or after the Red Scare of the Fifties—we shrug, pick up our backpacks, and soldier onward to thirst for the approval of our tormentors, even as we assure ourselves that, next time, the principal will step in.

OK—some of us, at least, are willing to express our preference to not be stuffed into lockers. As I said, there’s been a healthy number of professional Asians who have signed the letter and sent well-wishes. About this contingent, my feelings are much more mixed. I am exceedingly grateful that the list of signatories has grown, in part, thanks to the signatures of Asians who understand that there is no schoolmarm, no Commander-In-Chief, no benevolent authority who will swoop down from on high to stop the hate wave. And yet I am also exceedingly perplexed that, when I follow up to ask such persons to take one step further—in the form, perhaps, of publicly declaring support for the open letter—I receive a thousand variations on the old chestnut, “Would you look at the time!”

Yes, people have legitimate reasons for feeling overburdened and under-resourced. The pandemic has compounded the already-absurd sense of entitlement that our employers have with regard to our time. Still, I can’t help but speculate that maybe, just maybe, not a few of these persons have decided that inserting their name into a list of hundreds is a safe form of protest; leaving voice mails for the pastor of a fascist is quite another. And I have to say that I find this calculus immensely disheartening. What it means is that the letter is a perfectly worthy cause for other people to risk their reputations defending.

I’m pleading with anyone who’s reading this, especially Asians: we’re not going to get through the interlocking crises engulfing the planet without a dedicated and consistent effort at making the ruling class aware of how badly they’ve shat the bed. Vaguetweeting about racism isn’t enough. These people have to feel the heat. They planted and disseminated the model minority meme precisely in order to ensure that those of us whose eyes slant the wrong way will remain content languishing inside a metal oblong void, waiting for someone to realize we’ve been missing from Third Period Math for forty minutes. Please consider signing the open letter and talking back to the genteel clergypersons who have abdicated their moral responsibility and counted the suffering of Asian Americans, not to mention everyone else targeted by blood-and-soilers, an acceptable price to pay for their comfort. It may not be sufficient to bust open the locker door; but when the whole school is on fire, one can only wait for help so long.